Currently underway during Dymock’s residency, the exhibition brings together a new body of oil paintings exploring intimacy as a psychologically charged space shaped by seduction, mirroring, tenderness, and emotional consumption. Across dreamlike encounters, paired figures cradle, feed, engulf, and imitate one another, enacting relationships in which the boundaries between self and other begin to dissolve.
Working through allegory and psychological figuration, Dymock constructs scenes that resist fixed interpretation. Recurring motifs, apples, birds, bubbles, melting confection, and candy-coloured landscapes, evoke a contemporary Garden of Eden; not as a religious narrative, but as an artificial emotional paradise where desire, temptation, narcissism, guilt, and consumption become inseparable. Beneath the sweetness of the paintings lies a quieter instability, where affection shifts uneasily between nourishment and surrender.
Influenced by the psychological intensity and bodily drama of Baroque painting, particularly the works of Artemisia Gentileschi, Caravaggio, and Guido Reni, the paintings depict figures in eerie moments of composure amid emotionally unsettling encounters. Tenderness, domination, innocence, and discomfort coexist, drawing equally on the corporeal unease of Hans Bellmer and the staged emotional ambiguity of the paintings of Balthus and John Currin.
Central to the series is the material language of oil paint itself. Through flesh-like surfaces, visible brushwork, and luminous pastel palettes, Dymock transforms polished contemporary imagery into something slower, tactile, and psychologically charged, positioning hyper-contemporary aesthetics against the physical weight of historical painting traditions.
We invite you to join us for Dymock’s opening preview on Thursday, 2 July (6–8pm) at our Little Britain location. This exhibition will take place in conjunction with a solo show by Iris Bendt-Hedal Gentle Disruptions.
